Download A Lion for Love: A Critical Biography of Stendhal by Robert Alter PDF

Download A Lion for Love: A Critical Biography of Stendhal by Robert Alter PDF

By Robert Alter

"A Lion for romance is a version of severe biography—a attention-grabbing biography of a desirable man." (Larry McMurty Washington Star)

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As a boy, his first visits to the local theater, just a few hundred feet from his doorstep in the center of Grenoble, were in the company of Romain Gagnon. The fact that the place was dingy, badly lit, ill-smelling, in no way diminished its magic for him. ) By the season of 1 797-98, Henri was old enough to go off by himself to the theater, where he regularly watched performances from a standing-room place in the pit. It is hardly surprising that his free-floating desire, some of whose pass­ ing excitations we have noted, should now firmly attach iteslf to a particu­ lar object-a nineteen-year-old actress named Virginie Kubly.

Young Henri's rebellion against the paternal world seemed to him to receive public confirmation in the Revolution and its militant aftermath. Jacobin activism, impinging on the Beyles, visibly sharpened the hostility between father and son, while Henri found in politics a way of critically seeing the family constellation and, conversely, managed to feel through the immediate pressures of familial tensions the dynamics of political conflict. This habit of bracketing private distress and public upheaval probably encouraged a certain simplification and schematization in his vision of both realms, but in his fiction, it would at times provide him with a valuable means of dramatically defining both the historical and the familial scene with something of their intricate interrelation.

Badly dressed women" ( Brulard, chap. 1 5 ) . " As Stendhal tells us several times in Henry Brulard, there is a continual split in his consciousness between democratic principle and aristocratic pro­ pensity. He is eager to defend the rights of the people, but in actual inter­ course with the masses, he repeatedly finds them to be not le peuple, that sloganized ideal of republican rhetoric, but canaille-rabble, scum. Back at his grandfather's, after having received a gentle but firm warn­ ing from Aunt Elisabeth not to try such tricks again lest his father find out, Henri soon pushes aside his distaste for the filthiness of the Jacobins at the account of some new republican military victory that strikes the family with trepidation.